Lord Burghley said he was as lonely as an owl. His wife was dead; gout chewed at every joint in his body, and he had laboured in government service for over forty years. Punctually, at four every morning, he started work, and led a strictly ordered day. He had no close friends, 'no inward companion as great men commonly have', according to a contemporary, 'nor did any other know his secrets'. Music left him cold, he had no taste for poetry, nor did any private troupe of players ever cavort in his name. And he did look a little like an owl, with his dumpy figure, placid expression, high forehead, feathery white beard and large, watery, old-man's eyes. He was seventy, and Her Majesty had just screamed at him, calling him a 'froward old fool'. But then, she more often called him 'my Spirit', and asked tenderly after his comfort, even allowing him to sit in her presence when his weak hams trembled and his old knees hinged unbidden. He had indeed been bad-tempered and contrary of late; his lifelong forbearance, his bending calm, had become brittle and all too often snapped.
AS a younger man he had, with a pliability that is almost suspect, manoeuvred through the turbulence of Tudor succession, changing his allegiance three times in six years. Surviving other men's disgrace, nodding sadly at their executions, he had held on to public office under both Edward VI and Mary I to become the sage and solid stanchion for a flamboyant, inexperienced new Queen. William Cecil, descendant of a poor Welsh squire, had proceeded with certain step to a baronage and the highest office in the land. Along the way he had made a fortune and founded a dynasty. Burghley created networks of obligation and patronage that enriched him (he had an income of £25,000 a year at a time when the revenue of the State itself was only around £300,000) and magnified his power, establishing what Curtis Breight brands a Regnum Cecilianum, a Cecilian regime based on paranoia and terror, with surveillance as one of its lynchpins. It was Burghley who, when the Queen elevated him from Principal Secretary of State to Lord Treasurer, had hand-picked Sir Francis Walsingham to take his place, and taught him the value of informers at home and abroad. Yet if there was one thing that rivalled politics in importance to Lord Burghley, it was raising his family's status and perpetuating power through his line. His tomb effigy is in the style of a medieval knight in full armour - an affection of ancient nobility, an illusion of old money.
His eldest son Thomas was a wanton youth and a disappointment to him; his favourite daughter Anne made a seemingly dazzling match when she was just sixteen, to an aristocrat with a gift for poetry, the handsome Earl of Oxford - who went off alone to Italy, and was later reported romping with kitchen boys, swilling in drunkenness and saying scandalous things about the Holy Trinity. Burghley's views on poets, Italy, sodomites, libertines and atheists were not favourable. 'Suffer not [your] sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy and atheism,' he warned in a list of ten 'rules and advertisements for the squaring of thy life' intended for his younger son, Robert, on the brink of adulthood. For if anyone was to perpetuate the power of the Cecils, it would have to be this diminutive, crooked second son, whom Eleanor Bull would one day deride to the poet Marloe as a 'bunch-backed toad'.
From a fledgling age Robert had been aimed at high office. His education was full and rigorous, starting early in the morning and consuming most of the day with classics and modern languages, writing, science and theology. After books were closed came the pain and humiliation of fencing and dancing, as he wielded an outsized sword and manoeuvred ill on awkward, splayed feet. And here, to sharpen the shame, another Robert shone, a cuckoo in the Burghley nest, and one that grew resplendent plumage. He was the dashing, handsome and perfectly built Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex. The boys were almost the same age, and Devereux's father had died just a few years earlier. Lord Burghley, as Master of Wards, had taken him under his wing. Burghley had established in his household what amounted to an elite school for a handful of young aristocrats, many of whom were his legal wards. Young noblemen and old money were a fillip to family status, and he aimed to create a stable of powerful political supporters. Yet three of his charges, the Lords Rutland, Southampton and Oxford would one day form the heart of the anti-Cecilian faction in the country, and at its head would be the well-favoured Earl of Essex. To Robert Cecil it was as if his father had two sons of the same name, a legitimate one and a usurper; mismatched twins, one bent and graceless, the other manly, popular and athletic. And Robert Devereux did not take to this secretive son of a powerful commoner, whose thin eyebrows seemed constantly arched in disdain, who was clever, subtle and appeared never to sin. The two became rivals for life.
They went to separate colleges at Cambridge, Devereux to Trinity and Cecil to St John's, where he scorned the company of Tom Nashe and his disruptive friends including the malcontent Kit Marlin. The vice-chancellor praised him for his 'godly vigilance' at sermons and debates. At Gray's Inn, among law students notorious as riotous rumpus-makers, terrors of the London Watch, he singled himself out to the said Watch by passing them by with 'courtly salutation'. Courteousness, sweetness and charm became salient features of his public persona when he was introduced to the Queen, she called him 'my Pygmy', but on knowing him softened this to 'Elf. Yet behind this facade he was cool and calculating, and an artful manipulator. AJS Anthony Bacon later wrote of him to Essex: 'He is a man likely to trust much to his art and finesse (as he that is an excellent wherryman, who, you know, looketh toward the bridge [i.e. London Bridge] when he pulleth toward Westminster [the opposite direction]) that he will hope to serve his turn and yet preserve your Lordship's good opinion.' All the while he was carefully analysing why Sir Walter Ralegh had become unpopular with the people, divining how his monarch reasoned, and assimilating information - which he knew was his most powerful tool. Yet behind his heavy bulwark of privacy he was rash, extravagant, wildly promiscuous, and a reckless gambler, who tumbled into pits of blackest depression. Still, his father steered him firmly towards the top, advising:
Towards thy superiors be humble, yet generous, with thine equals familiar, yet respective; towards thine inferiors show much humanity, and some familiarity; as to bow the body, stretch forth the hand, and to uncover the head, with such like popular compliments. The first prepares thy way to advancement, the second makes thee known for a man well-bred; the third gains good report, which once got is easily kept; for high humilities take such deep root in the minds of the multitude, as they are easilier gained by unprofitable courtesies, then by churlish benefits . . .
Yet in this blueprint for manipulation of 'the multitude', Burghley sounded a warning: 'I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Seek not to be an Essex, shun to be a Ralegh.' The triad of antagonism that would establish itself between his son and the Queen's rival favourites in the late 1580s was already clear in the perceptive old man's mind. The 'Pygmy' could never participate in the coquetry that would win him Elizabeth's personal favour, but both father and son were determined he could grasp high office.
By the time Robert was eighteen, Lord Burghley had already arranged that he be made a Member of Parliament. In 1588, the year Kit and Oliver were sent on the mission to Italy and Sir Francis Walsingham was intensifying espionage activity on the Continent, Robert Cecil is recorded as a confidential messenger, paid for 'bringinge \ettres in post, for her majestes affaires, from her highnes Commissioners at Ostend'. Young as he was, he had his eye on the ailing Sir Francis's job, and wove himself carefully into the heart of the secret service. The other Robert was much of the same mind, and was also building up a band of informers. He had been introduced to Court by his stepfather the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's old favourite and Lord Burgh-ley's long-time rival, and by 1587 was Master of the Horse and ascending into Her Majesty's very highest favour. When Robert Dudley died the following year, the battle between Ralegh and Essex for the position of 'favourite' led to open conflict and screaming rows with the Queen, and later almost to a duel, which the Privy Council defused to prevent further indignity. As England moved into a new decade Essex's fortunes were on the rise, and still the Queen seemed reluctant to grant Robert Cecil public office. And then in April 1590, corroded by cancer, Sir Francis Walsingham died.
Robert Cecil immediately conducted a clandestine raid on Walsingham's house, filching material from the archives. Some of the secrets he uncovered he did not even tell his father. A subtle battle ensued to control Walsingham's network, with some agents going over to Essex and others remaining with the Cecils, as Lord Burghley officially re-assumed Sir Francis's role as Secretary of State. He had always run agents of his own, and now that Sir Francis was dead, resumed control of a much-expanded secret service, while Robert increased his activities behind the scenes. But all Burghley's powers of persuasion could not move the Queen to accept his son's appointment to the Privy Council. Even when she relented, and knighted Robert, approving his appointment in August the following year, the position of Principal Secretary seemed way beyond his reach. And the Earl of Essex was coming up close behind.
Essex had begged the Queen on his knees (quite literally on one occasion for a solid two hours) to be sent at the head of an army to France, and for once Lord Burghley seemed in support of a military campaign, no doubt to remove Essex from the political scene. Robert Cecil's appointment to the Privy Council came a week after the earl set sail. When Essex returned in 1592, after a dismal campaign, he turned his attention from soldiering to politics and his efforts against the Cecils became increasingly apparent. He was already getting the upper hand in his power struggle with Sir Walter Ralegh, who had dramatically fallen from grace in 1592 when he secretly married a pregnant Bess Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting. A year later Essex became a member of the Privy Council.
For Robert Cecil the situation was becoming fraught. Lord Burghley was increasingly incapacitated by illness, and though Cecil was doing much of the work, the Queen gave no sign of appointing him Secretary. As the astute Thomas Wilkes, a clerk of the Privy Council, had put it to Sir Henry Sidney when Cecil joined the Council: 'Sir Robert Cecil, as you may have heard, is sworn to the Council, though not [as] secretary, whose election will be a bar to the choice of any secretary during the lifetime of his father.' While Burghley was alive, the position was safe, but as soon as he died it would be open to all comers. As Burghley declined further, desperate measures were called for. Gradually Robert Cecil came up with a scheme so audacious that he dared not tell even his father - a plan that, if it were successful, would not only earn him Burghley's admiration but the full reward of the Queen's gratitude. It was a low and creeping plot, one that extended as far as Prague, and had a stray tendril that was already winding itself around the ankle of the poet Christopher Marloe.